Salesforce Aims to Become AI Control Plane for Enterprises

At Dreamforce, Salesforce presented itself as a competitor for the enterprise AI budget by emphasizing its ability to help customers get more value from their existing budget. The company is no longer just offering more products to buy but rather positioning itself as a layer that determines which resources to use and provides trusted context, governance, security, actions, and controls behind various experiences.

Salesforce's Enterprise AI Harness consists of six trusted capabilities: Trusted Context, Agency, Action, Governance, Security, and Models. The Control Plane is intended to provide a common place to discover and register agents and AI capabilities, establish identity and policy, observe behavior and outcomes, manage lifecycle, evaluate performance, and control cost across Salesforce and third-party AI.

The company's goal is to become the resource management and optimization layer for enterprise AI, allowing it to create value across AI spending that may ultimately flow to many different providers. This changes the economics of the relationship, as Salesforce doesn't have to own every model or user experience to participate in the enterprise AI budget.

According to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, open models are becoming increasingly popular, with 70% now available compared to just 30% at the beginning of the year. This means enterprises will have more choices for how particular AI tasks get performed, and Salesforce is working on breaking down workloads into specialized models rather than using a single large general-purpose model.

As the enterprise architect, it's becoming increasingly difficult to evaluate every request in real time and decide which model, resource, workflow, or deterministic process offers the best combination of accuracy, performance, security, compliance, and cost. The user should be able to ask for the business outcome, and the platform should determine the most appropriate resources for delivering it.